Adventure FPS Away: Journey to the Unexpected Available Now on Xbox One

Hello everyone! Away: Journey to the Unexpected is a colorful first-person adventure game with rogue-lite elements, heavily inspired by anime from our childhood, and it’s available today on Xbox One. The game has evolved quite a bit since its prototype. To celebrate the launch, let’s take a look back at how it changed throughout development.

In the first concept of the game, you had to capture spirits but we figured making friends was much more fun. So, we ended up changing the name of the game to what it currently is!

We had to make sure the game would be fun, so we built everything with cubes and sketches. It’s pretty nice to see how things changed between then and now. Don’t those seesaw seem much less threatening?

When you meet up with Gina Konbini in the game, you’ll be able to buy various items at her shop. But in early prototypes, we actually had vending machines! In the end, we thought interacting with a person would be nicer.

The game begins with an animated opening complete with a full music track! The opening actually took 8 months to create. Here’s an example of going from the animated storyboard to the final version (which we’ll fully reveal closer to launch!).

Additionally, we really made sure that the combat gameplay worked without animations first! When we were satisfied with the feel of it, then we moved on to the animation.

And finally, the caves were so easy to miss in the early simplified prototypes that we had to put a sign in front of each one that said “Go inside”! Ah, fun memories…

I hope you enjoyed getting a behind-the-scenes look at Away: Journey to the Unexpected. I hope you’ll have fun with it.